


The Clause

by jackmarlowe



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1990s, AIDS crisis, Activism, Chronic Illness, F/F, Gay/Lesbian Friendship, Gen, Grief, HIV/AIDS, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Muggle London, Post-Thatcher Wasteland Britain, Werewolf Culture, Werewolf Discrimination, going for dark comedy here tbh despite the tags!, lavender marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-06 07:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17340791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: Two months shy of Sirius’ death and the hospitalisation of his Muggle flatmate Sean, who was dying of AIDS, Remus Lupin received a letter from the Werewolf Registry and decided before he opened it that he’d had about his fucking fill of tragedy for the year.With their communities in crisis and grief seeping into every crack, Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks hash out a marriage of convenience.





	The Clause

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of spontaneous attempt to re-write what I think must’ve been my first typed-up fan fiction story. I wrote a few pages of a scene involving Tonks and Lupin having an awkward, fraught conversation after Sirius' funeral on a clunky 1980s iMac when I was eleven or twelve, about a decade and a half before I knew I was a gay man and a good few years before I acknowledged I wanted to write about gay people and relationships. I haven’t finished anything in a while so this isn’t my usual style or something I’d been planning, but it ended up being a challenge to myself to connect my first subconscious understandings of gay longing and grief and love and solidarity with the kinds of stories and relationships I love now. This is just a little piece but I’m glad I started typing it up on my phone the other day.
> 
> There are some explanatory/historical/acronym notes at the bottom for the curious, but this story is set between winter 1996 and summer 1997, so roughly correlating with the middle to the end of the Half-Blood Prince. 1996 was also the year that antiretroviral therapy became widely available for people living with HIV and AIDS. I've taken a couple of canon liberties and slightly less so with the historical context.

Two months shy of Sirius’ death and the hospitalisation of his Muggle flatmate Sean, who was dying of AIDS, Remus Lupin received a letter from the Werewolf Registry and decided before he opened it that he’d had about his fucking fill of tragedy for the year.

This wasn’t suggesting anything in particular – Remus had, like many of his demographic and condition and the few who shared his peculiar history, grown out of regularly contemplating suicide some time in his mid-twenties once the war passed and he sorted out what a regular sex life looked like. But it was a sort of turning point in his mind, reading dully over the familiar apologetic script of one of the three clerks who’d manned the Ministry’s least favourite desk for as long as he’d been old enough to handle the correspondence himself. It required a decision and planning, bureaucracy that stretched more than a few months into the future. He and the letter were damp from the rain, thin blazer heavy on his shoulders and green ink blurred from being too long out of the owl’s clutches, and it simply, bluntly reminded him – he had good and unselfish reason to forget these days and no one to remind him otherwise – that he was not dying. Like Sean, who to his own warring mix of Republican disgust and camp delight had had his hand shaken by the generously ungloved Princess of Wales just last week, Remus did not plan far ahead these days.

He rang Dennis, the old queen who ran the Kentish Town mobile library where he worked sometimes, because other gay werewolves who might’ve had a more acute perspective were spread thin and frankly he was sick of talking to wizards. After Sirius’ death, Remus had chosen to concentrate on the Muggle world’s problems for as long as Dumbledore would let him – two months and a bit, so far, and only a few crisis calls to Dennis in that time. He sounded, when Remus said abruptly that he was thinking of getting married, as though he might prefer crisis to even a whiff of compulsory heterosexuality.

‘Calm down, duck,’ he soothed, and for all his Huddersfield charm Remus could picture the rising panic in his bleary eyes. ‘We’ll sort this out-’

‘-I’m not worried, exactly, just-’

‘No need to break out the lace yet, is there, eh, Greta fucking Garbo! What’s brought this on?’

He found it quite easy to talk to Dennis about problems specific to the wizarding world, partly because euphemism was Dennis’ mother tongue and also because he was of a generation slightly more familiar with what werewolves dealt with now. Gays today just died or feared infection, which werewolves did their fair bit of but not by plague or in such horror-numbers. He needed access to treatment – this made Dennis go proper quiet – that, he insinuated, came easier if you were married. He was worried, quite rightly, that things were getting worse for his people regardless of the protective qualities of London and a teaching qualification. And, Remus did not have to add, and perhaps quite hadn’t formulated himself with the letter still in his lap, he’d been fucking shattered and rebuilt on every hard surface in this city this year and had more suffering still in sight. Farce or not – Sean would have him lean into farce and at this point Remus couldn’t argue with that – he was so very fucking lonely.

Dennis, who knew the most important things about Sirius, could hear the last bit in his voice. Remus realised that just after he said his carefully edited piece. He was quiet for a moment besides the soft creak of the plastic phone cable he’d somehow wired into the library van winding ‘round his thumb.

‘We-e-l-ll,’ Dennis said, and hesitated. He let out a short huff and went briefly earnest for the first time since Remus’d known him. ‘God alive, Remus. Ask a lesbian, if you must. But it’s bad times, my darling, if we’ve come back to that.’

He’d not spoken to Tonks since a few days after Sirius died, and was both surprised and a little embarrassed to find that she’d never lived in London in the first place. Kingsley’s owl was politely noncommittal and attached a Muggle address on the southwest coast. Remus took it with him out to the ward in Middlesex, ostensibly to get Sean to remind him how to look up the telephone number.

Multiple times in the past three years, he’d contemplated telling Sean why he had these little spells of forgetting mundane things essential to everyday Muggle life. For a werewolf, Remus was not a good liar, or rather lacked the energy to invent small details and keep to them consistently – his suggestion that he might just be secretly posh, for example, Sean had discarded so fast Remus wasn’t sure he even remembered it. Now spilling the beans seemed unnecessarily cruel, when Sean’s patience for hard conversations had dried up along with his jokes and sex drive. Remus’ copy of _Leaves of Grass_ , carefully bookmarked for short reads, lay half-heartedly thumbed through on the bedside table.

Sean still cracked a sceptical hollowed-out eye, though, when Remus asked how to ring a number in Cornwall.

‘Tell me this isn’t for tragic reasons,’ he rasped, hoisting himself suspiciously up on his elbows and shoving his limp curls out of his face with the heel of one hand. ‘This seems like it could very well be a tragic reason.’

Remus shrugged. The bones around his eyes ached and he hadn’t been paying attention when the nurse spoke in hushed tones outside Sean’s door about changes to his medication, which he felt a bit bad about. ‘Maiden aunt in Cornwall. I’m about to inherit.’

‘Oh, a _windfall_. Lucky me.’

‘I’ll buy you a signed copy of your photo with Lady Di,’ Remus said lightly, and got a flutter of a familiar sneer in response.

Sean took a few deep breaths over the soft beep of the machine behind his bed.

‘You’d tell me,’ he said, lower in that serious and unnervingly un-camp tone Remus was beginning to associate with him and several of their friends’ illness. ‘If it was about your man. Wouldn’t you?’

Leaving out the fact that he was a wizard and a werewolf felt reasonable, given Sean’s condition; lying about Sirius on top of that just seemed unfair. Two days after Sean had discovered his first KS bruise on the back of his heel, Remus, who hadn’t rung after drifting away from their old tenancy, had turned up back at his doorstep rocking through a panic attack in week-old clothes. Sean, who’d grown up crossing checkpoints to visit his grandparents in Derry, understood that Sirius had been murdered without Remus telling him so, and knew what to do for the full day after that where Remus found he couldn’t speak at all. The only thing Sean had said about the whole incident was that it was good timing for getting him reacquainted with death.

Remus tipped his chair back a little and watched him – Sean, who’d aged twenty years in one and looked like his own grandfather who Remus knew he badly wished would visit. ‘I need to speak to his cousin,’ he admitted quietly.

‘Remus.’

‘It’s not really about him. I know her – we’re friends. We worked together.’

‘In _Cornwall?_ ’

‘That’ll be where her family lives. I suppose. I sort of fell out of touch.’ He pushed his hands hard down the line of his threadbare jeans, a Muggle staple that’d always been more Sirius’ thing than his. ‘It’s just a conversation we need to have.’

Sean huffed and coughed. ‘Where’d his things go.’

‘Sirius’s?’ The question took him aback – these were the kinds of details Sean hadn’t looked to unearth.

‘Aye. She got them?’

Remus winced and rubbed his eyes irritably, pushing further back from the bed. ‘No. I don’t know. They’re at his parents’ old place, friends are looking after it – I told you. I don’t want you worrying about all that. It’s not important.’

‘So what do you want from herself, then? Why now?'

‘I thought,’ he snapped, and immediately regretted his own volume for the energy he saw it sap from Sean’s gaunt face, ‘I might ask her to marry me. Take her away from all this, or vice versa.’

The phone call was a brief one. Tonks was indeed back living with her parents – something about being out of London for a while, though her father, who Remus remembered just before he dialled the number was called Ted, said she Apparated in every few weeks to report back to the Ministry about the case she was working on. Implied in this was that Tonks was still making regular trips to Grimmuald Place, which Remus supposed made sense. She’d not had the first war to wear her out and she and Sirius had not been as close as they might’ve been with more time and different circumstances. Ted Tonks sounded eager on the phone: Remus wondered if she was wrecking the house or seemed to need the company, or both.

On the agreed-upon evening, December four days after the full moon, he Apparated to the old tracks under the Vauxhall Tube station and found magic disagreed with him after a while away. Something metallic and ragged left over from the transformation hit his gag reflex; he had to put an aching knee down in the gritty mud to stop from losing his balance. Remus found himself in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern looking sorrier than usual with his jeans soaked at the knees and Sirius’ old school leather jacket hanging looser around him than it once had. The one glance he got from the crowd at the bar, an ex-National actor whose name, he remembered from somewhere in the last decade, was Naveed, burned hot and peculiar in the raw back of his throat.

Tonks looked very different from the last time they’d come here together. Then, she’d worn what Remus thought of as her natural form – pink spiky hair, denim jacket with a BUTCH LOVE/BUTCH RAGE patch attached to the back with a Permanent Sticking Charm, purple combat boots and black cargo trousers. She sat now with a new-shorn mousy head and a plain black jumper, curled looking ten years older around an undrunk pint – Remus followed the femme girls’ glances to the corner to find her.

She accepted a kiss on the cheek but didn’t say hello, instead smiling wanly as he took the seat opposite. ‘You’re looking peachy.’

A little helpless laugh escaped him and she snorted loudly – Diana Ross had just finished and a few heads on the dance floor turned suspiciously at the burst of sound for potential straight tourists. Tonks noticed and stuck her pierced tongue out pointedly at the far side of the bar.

‘When did Jamie stop doing her show?’ she wanted to know. ‘She’s alright, isn’t she?’

Jamie was the Saturday night drag queen who only wore green and a Squib, one of the few people who knew to smell magic on them. Her stage name was the Wicked Bitch of the West and she’d once drunkenly begged Remus to Obliviate her ex-boyfriend after she slipped him a cheap love potion that made him fall in love with a Wimbledon FC footballer. Remus nodded.

‘As far as I know, yes. She went to Australia, I think. Something about her family being vulnerable at the Ministry.’

They were used to speaking covertly in public but the suddenness of it touched behind Tonks’ eyes, today dark brown and heavy-lidded. Remus circled fingers around the base of his pint glass uncertainly and the DJ started up again with Kylie, sending a trickle of people whooping from the bar to the dance floor.

They talked in cautious, general terms at first, circling around the obvious until they’d finished a few drinks and established their odd little corner – thirty-blah gay man who looked older with his grey hair and lines and faded boring shirt beneath Sirius’ old jacket, no-nonsense younger butch who looked worn out and hadn’t glanced towards the women. Living with parents was a necessary drag; she couldn’t talk about the Auror stuff; Molly Weasley, after four pints, had revealed she’d had sex with Celestina Warbeck after a concert in the Sixties. Headquarters had gone quiet and Dumbledore was away, which made Remus wonder if he was really being afforded a personal mourning period or if it was simply more convenient this way.

Remus could feel Tonks taking him in and wondered, as he only did with her and a few of his other magical friends, what she thought she was looking for in spotting signs of illness – if people thought they understood a werewolf baseline well enough to know. Tricky to pin a firm diagnosis on him, when he frankly couldn’t tell you what his own normal temperature range was meant to be. That was something he hadn’t quite gotten to cover in his own Defence Against the Dark Arts classes. Illness, or what – grief?

There was something hard around the edges with her, too, that he suspected would make it difficult for them to meet in the middle the way they used to. Don’t push it.

Sirius’ name came up once, when Depeche Mode came on and Tonks immediately recalled Sirius’ old insistence that Martin Gore couldn’t have written “Personal Jesus” without having sucked someone’s cock in a public toilet. Remus, to his slight surprise, just felt a little amused that she’d chosen this anecdote to deliberately test the waters – the memory of doing just that to Sirius in the RVT toilet on New Years Eve, some time during the first war, came up vivid in the back of his throat with sweat and cum and whiskey but felt safely removed, like a fantasy.

She did not, to his relief, do something earnest like take his hand, or interrogate him like Sean with his blunt dying insistence. She knew enough people in London still, Remus sensed, watching her nod and grin to a few faces who slipped past on the dance floor, that she’d learned how to manage grief in a place like this without stumbling. It was that or she wasn’t saying as much about the progress of the war as she might.

After a while, it became clear that they still had something to speak about; Tonks’ eyes had flicked meaningfully more than once to where his wand sat in his waistband, a sort of request for information related to what they had in common that wasn’t here. Remus decided to bite the proverbial silver bullet and slipped the envelope out of his coat pocket, sliding it across the table between their glasses.

Tonks saw the familiar Ministry seal and did a little tipsy scoffing _ooh-er_ twist with her head. She opened it carefully and hesitated, thrusting her head closer to talk over the disco.

‘Do you mind – sorry – do you mind if I read it out, just to myself?’ She stuck her tongue wryly in the corner of her mouth and Remus could see she was genuinely embarrassed. ‘Dad had this idea last month – well, it something you said, actually, and it stuck with him. He got me to go see a Muggle doctor and I’ve got that thing you’d said you read about in the Muggle papers, last year, about that thing they’re looking out for in schools now – dyslexia.’

Remus blinked, a little drunk and pleased. He suspected he’d feel more of a spike of nerves without the drink and was glad for it, though he’d been avoiding alcohol since Sirius’ death at Sean’s dark insistence. ‘They diagnosed you as an adult?’

‘Yeah. Moody wouldn’t put it in my file – said it explained me being dead clumsy, he said it was Muggle rubbish and I was either dropped on my head or Confunded at birth – but there you are.'

He had the presence of mind to put his hand to his wand and murmur _Muffliato_ , but only just. ‘Go on, then.’

Tonks noticed the spell and refilled her glass from under the table with a crooked grin. She cleared her throat and took on an official tone that quickly petered out:

_‘Dear Mr Lupin,_

_We are writing to inform you or your licenced caregiver –_ Jesus, they’re ominous in Magical Creatures, aren’t they-’

‘Nothing like state oppression,’ Remus said, slightly testily.

‘Right, sorry – it’s that Umbridge, I swear she’s running a Gestapo 101 for boring clerks – anyway-’ She sipped her whiskey shot and squinted.

_‘-you or your licenced caregiver of an important policy change relevant to your status as a registered non-human member of the Registry for Werewolves. Please read this letter in full, as it contains essential information relating to individuals with your case details._

_Now more than ever, the Ministry is committed to balancing the rights and care of lycanthropy-affected individuals with the safety of magical and non-magical populations. We work tirelessly with St Mungo’s Infirmary’s Healers, Muggle experts, and Magical Law Enforcement to ensure a healthy, fulfilling quality of life for all registered werewolves and all those who live in their immediate vicinity.’_

Tonks eyed the scabbed-over fresh scratches along his cheek and nodded meaningfully to his pint, which she’d been refilling surreptitiously in acknowledgement of his thin wallet. ‘How’s that going?’

‘Delightfully.’ Nerves and a vague sense of dread, Remus registered, were coming up in his chest now. ‘Read the rest.’

‘ _You may already be familiar with “AIDS”-’_ And here her tone sobered up entirely ‘- _a lethal Muggle ailment affecting Muggle inverts and “drug” users in particular over the past decade. We are delighted that Ministry efforts have ensured the safety of the magical population despite AIDS’ widespread prevalence in the Muggle world._

_We are contacting you as a matter of urgency, however, to inform you that such Ministry efforts now include new guidance for male lycanthropic individuals reliant on the Wolfsbane Potion. A recent study conducted in coordination with Muggle Healers, or ‘doctors’, has provided strong evidence that Wolfsbane treatment may interact negatively with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the infection that commonly leads to AIDS._

_Therefore, we are temporarily limiting access to Mungo’s-brewed Wolfsbane Potion for lycanthropic male patients over 18 years old to married individuals._

_As the Ministry believes you to be in a particularly high-risk demographic, this policy change will apply to your access to the Wolfsbane Potion effective from the first of next month._

_We advise you to make alternative arrangements immediately, and to keep us advised of your situation._

_Best wishes,’_

Tonks slapped the letter down firmly without looking up. The paper inhaled some slopped cider; Remus let it. They sat with this for a moment as Bronski Beat shrieked into gear, sending a new wave towards the dance floor – _Tell me whyyyyyy_ …

She shook her drab head slowly and gestured towards the door, jerking two fingers to her lips in a cigarette-mime. Remus followed her into the tangle of limbs and bodies, feeling a brief surge of energy through the drink as he brushed hips with Naveed, and then they were out the door with the late-night Vauxhall busses buzzing the tables of the crammed little smoking area.

He rolled them fags and neither of them spoke until they’d lit them. ‘Fucking _cunts_ ,’ Tonks hissed, as truly venomous as he’d ever heard her.

Remus shrugged. He nearly expected better from another gay person, but Tonks was Ministry, for all her good politics and being in the Order – anti-werewolf legislation, even when mixed with homophobia, still surprised people even when it was cooked up right under their noses. ‘It is what it is.’

‘Can’t you get it through Dumbledore?’

‘I did when I was at Hogwarts.’ With the music thumping behind a closed door, he was suddenly conscious of keeping his voice down even over the chatter of the smoking area, and of being embarrassed – still – about talking about this. ‘And Severus carried on for a few more months. But I’ve been getting it from Mungo’s for a while now, since I’ve been in London, and I’m on the Registry anyway – I have to declare where I’m getting it from,’ he added, seeing her round face contract blankly. ‘The materials are restricted nationally, so the ban applies even if I was getting Severus or someone to make it for me.’

‘But surely Dumbledore-’ She shook her head incredulously, flicking her fag tip hard. ‘He can pull some strings, can’t he? What’s the use of being in the Order if you can’t use Ministry insiders to bend some rules? And you haven’t even got it, have you?’

‘You read the papers these days,’ he said flatly, pointedly ignoring the question about his status – younger people were sometimes too cavalier with that. ‘The _Prophet_ still hates Dumbledore’s guts, and the _Sun_ ’s done such a number on us people yell “AIDS” before “fucking queers” now.’

He nearly didn’t say: _am I in the Order, even, if I haven’t spoken to Dumbledore since June?_ but given the gravity of what he was about to ask, he stubbed out his cigarette and leaned in close, turning her a little towards the wall with his shoulder to block the view of a lesbian they knew vaguely. She tensed reflexively; Remus ducked his head against his narrow chest.

‘I can’t rely on Dumbledore’s goodwill,’ he said quietly. ‘Not for something like this. I’d rather keep this to myself and deal with it accordingly – or within the family, at least.’

Tonks’ eyebrow gave a wry little quirk at this soft exclusion of Dumbledore. Remus shook his head.

‘He’s not the type to go out of his way on that basis. And I know this won’t sound – _very fucking ACT UP_ of me, but I’m tired, Dora. I’m just really fucking tired.’ A little blast of cold air shoved itself between the press of buildings and he thrust his hands into his jean pockets. Winter around the moon was the worst time of year. ‘You know better than most people what fighting something like this with the Ministry actually entails – when they’ve got nineteenth century vocabulary for it, when this is the first and only magical acknowledgement of the epidemic I’ve heard of, and of course-! It’s targeted at the people least legally equipped to protect ourselves. I just can’t afford to have something else counted against me right now.’

‘After the year we’ve had,’ she murmured.

‘I meant practically, on paper. I’ve been on the dole for six months and I’m living in my friend’s flat while he’s in hospital.’ Remus swallowed. ‘But that too.’

A tall harnessed man swayed drunkenly into Tonks, jolting her; they both tensed this time, Remus’ hand instantly on his wand, but then he slurred something about wanting a spare filter. Remus handed him one and he moved off. The two of them looked at one another, reeling a bit from the sudden burst of mutual fight-or-flight adrenaline.

‘Shall we get out of here?’

She paused. ‘I did want to dance a bit. Now I’m here. It’s been a good while.’

‘I-’ Remus realised, too late, that he had no idea how to ask, and that they were no longer sitting down where he imagined the conversation would take place. This was the thing about making plans he’d forgotten: Sirius was no longer here to anticipate what he might say, and offer up the solution before Remus thought it through properly himself.

His hesitation, acutely not from drink, made it dawn on Tonks; he saw a little flick of surprised gold shoot through her pupils and her hands reflexively curled into fists.

‘Remus-’

‘I meant to – well, I wasn’t going to get down on my knees, but-’

‘But-’ She bit her lip and shook her head, hissing out a shaky laughing incredulous breath that turned to steam and mingled with the low haze of smoke. ‘Jesus, Remus. I can’t.’

This was, somehow, very genuinely the last thing he’d expected her to say, and it jolted him so much he felt it pass through his face and sting.

‘I didn’t want to spring this on you. Believe me, it’s embarrassing – it’s more embarrassing for me. I don’t know. But – it’s just a formality, you know, safety in numbers. Lots of Muggles are doing it for visitation rights in hospital, we don’t have to – I don’t know, move in together, or even tell-’

‘You read the papers these days,’ she said bluntly, turning his own words suddenly into an accusation. ‘I just lost my girlfriend, Remus. Amelia Bones. She died a month after Sirius.’

His mind had suddenly gone quite blank. Amelia Bones conjured up: tweed suit, thirty years older at least, monocle, Ministry. Friends with Dumbledore and probably the Order. He’d known she was gay in the way you did but had never spoken to her except in passing. He vaguely recalled she’d come to Sirius’ memorial – with Tonks, then.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah.’ And suddenly it dropped together, with that particular bitter note slamming over the thump of the music – the particular quality to her new hard edges was his own, translated into the dark circles under her eyes and the unfamiliar drabness of her hair and clothes. Tonks was grieving in a way that was silent and had nothing at all to do with the Order or the backdrop of the war or the unspoken awful weary something that’d hung over the Royal Vauxhall Tavern for the past decade.

‘We didn’t really tell anyone,’ she added quietly. ‘But it was a good year and a bit. I told Sirius right before – assumed he’d tell you. I know it’s nothing like you and him, but. I’ve still got no fucking clue what to do with myself.’

‘I mean, I didn’t know she’d died,’ he admitted, and immediately regretted saying so and like that. Tonks’ face went hard and she took a little step back from their corner, taking the little pocket of shared body heat with her.

‘I thought that might’ve been why you wanted to see me after all these months,’ she said, flat. ‘I told you I’d be there, after Sirius. You never took me up on the offer. There’s still been a fucking war on, you know?’

Remus’ numb lips went tight. ‘I know that.’

‘Christ, Remus.’ Her own mouth was trembling, and he realised to his own vivid horror that she hadn’t told anyone else besides Sirius about her and Amelia – that this was the first disclosure, not a frightening or joyful or heart-in-her-mouth thing but alongside news of her lover’s death. ‘We do enough by ourselves as it is.’

‘Dora-’

‘You know that’s not my name,’ Tonks said with a heavy, dull finality, and turned on her heel back into the warm neon indoors.  


* * *

  
The year turned and spring started looking more likely, as did a Labour government. Remus still hadn’t heard from Dumbledore and Sean, slightly to his own surprise and dismay, still hadn’t died. His T-cell count, in fact, had crept up, as had his weight and the edge of colour in his sunken freckled cheeks. The doctors kept cautiously tight-lipped about Sean and a few others on the ward, but some of the groups in the States had started using the phrase ‘Lazarus effect’ about the new drugs. People were coming back from the edge many of them had learned to see as the inevitable.

The possibility of a reprieve did not wipe the near-death bluntness from Sean’s demeanour. He demanded Remus get tested twice as a condition of continuing to stay in his flat and claimed not to believe either result, though Remus had volunteered in his share of sexual health clinics over the past decade and had checked the numbers himself.

Remus couldn’t particularly blame him for his worry, though – he had done two transformations now without Wolfsbane, once in an old meat freezer and once up near the Borders in an old werewolf squat he knew, and it showed. When he was a teenager, it’d actually been possible for his body to recover somewhat in the space between unmedicated moons; now he frequently woke up with his joints screaming and his legs so locked up that he limped for hours every morning. He’d lost nearly a stone and his reflection in the morning mirror was gaunt and lined, his grey eyes seeming exaggeratedly wide-set and chronic pain tugging visibly at the corners of his mouth when he shifted his weight.

He was so fucking tired and so fucking tired of it and yet the epidemic appearing to shift its trajectory had a palpable effect on how much he felt able to take. Thinking about Sirius, too, was getting easier, or at least more frequent and at times he chose, like the natural cycle of going outside more as the weather improved. Sean asked to see a picture of him and Remus realised after digging through some of his things that he didn’t have a Muggle one. The ones before Azkaban, where Sirius laughed and blinked full-mouthed and perfectly quaffed alongside James and Lily and Peter, looked strange now. Remus had almost gotten used to the sort of pleasant accident of rapidly ageing alongside each other, of Sirius’ time in Azkaban roughly traceable to his own lines and wear.

He finally sent an owl to his parents, who hadn’t left the Midlands in twenty years but wrote back immediately with promises to visit London, their worry and relief palpably mixed. He considered writing to Harry at Hogwarts, but finally decided against it for a number of reasons. Dumbledore didn’t write, which was just fine by him, but he started paying for the _Prophet_ again and Apparated instead of taking the Tube or bus.

A few Muggle friends from the old days had realised he was back in London. Tim offered him a job pulling weekend pints at Molly Moggs, which he took after some deliberation to see him through the spring in Sean’s flat in Kentish Town. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he saw Dennis, who fussed over the re-organisation of the mobile library by obscure sub-genre. Sean pointedly suggested he get laid – or, rather, gallantly offered a blowjob while on an intravenous drip – which seemed ridiculous but he started having the odd wank again. This was hardly planning ahead but it was a life. The fact of it, the everydayness of it, was sometimes so unnerving he lost feeling in his hands and swayed on the spot.

The extent and ambition of his plans ended with the situation with the Werewolf Registry. Remus was very aware that the situation was untenable and very fucking dangerous; going off Wolfsbane also meant he was in a lot of pain, which made standing behind the bar and lifting stacks of books tricky lines of employment. It’d occurred to him to reach out to some of the London werewolves, but he’d not been briefed by the Order in a long time and couldn’t know the extent to which Voldemort, probably via Greyback, had wormed his way into which groups. Marriage seemed like the easiest step towards re-accessing the Potion, but that bubble of an idea had popped months ago and there was only so much a recently bereaved, very disenfranchised gay werewolf who pulled pints at the weekends could do to put a sham wedding into motion.

Tonks’ owl, then, jolted him when it arrived one rainy Friday afternoon in April. She was a big tawny with blown-back feathers who squeezed herself under his reaching hand into the open window of Sean’s little flat, inviting herself onto the kitchen counter and blinking curiously about. Remus had to flick her beak hastily to keep her out of the curry he was stirring on the hob and then redirect her from chewing on his ratty mustard jumper edge as he untied the letter from her leg.

He read it aloud under his breath as the owl happily explored the condensation-damp little kitchen, falling unconsciously into the habit he associated with Tonks:

‘ _Dear Moony,_

_Sorry for the radio silence. Probably more your fault but I had something to do with it. Also been very busy down in CAN’T SAY!!! on Ministry business, but the case is closed up now. Something to do with kelpies. We should’ve called you in as an expert._

_Kingsley says you’re still on strike. Fair enough. Wondered if you do things in the Muggle world though. I’ve been volunteering – oh yes I am back in London, did I say?? – for the Lesbian + Gay Switchboard._ _Occasional heartwarming calls and everything. It’s a whole new world._

_Meeting for new volunteers next week. I know you used to do a lot of that but it’s not so depressing anymore. Would love to see you if you fancy it + a drink._

_Love, Tonks._ ’

It turned out he was a good few years behind on his knowledge of AIDS care, and completely in the dark when it came to the new drugs that were filling out Sean’s frame and bringing some of their people back from the dead. Sat in the back-middle row of a Lambeth community hall with Tonks, who’d rediscovered her combat boots and enough social confidence to wink at a few people as they walked in, Remus found himself a little self-consciously taking notes.

They’d developed a procedure over the years for answering the phone. The resources volunteers used most frequently for calls were a recently updated ‘PWA checklist’ – some survival notes for people calling about HIV and AIDS regardless of their status – and a cheat-sheet for the increasing number of kids and twenty-somethings calling for sex ed or help with their school and uni gay groups getting Section 28'd. This meeting, the thirty-something posh-sounding gay man from the Terrence Higgins Trust explained, was to start to brainstorm what came next. How did you answer the phone, he suggested, for someone who two weeks ago thought they’d been given a death sentence?

The crowd was something else here – not like the days when he’d dragged Sirius along to GLF meetings but an odd mix of people thrown together by necessity, including what looked like some straight people. Tonks leaned forward, taking in the speaker fiercely, and when he made a wry comment about the gruelling undignified transition from end-of-life care to middle age drag she looked back at Remus and grinned.

They ended up in Soho a few streets away from where he worked, jostled between younger men and the usual many-aged women whose population had grown since Remus had last been involved. Despite several pints and a sudden burst of abandon, Remus’ knees hurt after his first foray onto the dance floor in about five years and he retreated to the smokers at the front entrance.

Naveed was there, camelhair jacket hanging casual and a little absurd off his shoulder and black hair slicked back with a fresh undercut. He had a little gaggle of people around him – mostly younger, none of the activist types currently shouldering around the bar – but made eye contact with Remus as he came out, dipped his chin in a friendly meaningful way. Ten years ago Remus would’ve taken the cue and gone over, in a way Sirius for all his drawl and natural instinct had never really learned to do with men; now he let the look linger and quirked a smile but did not move. That was something his body didn’t quite know how to carry off.

Leaning against the brick with people passing quick through the brisk April night, Remus was plenty aware of his own body – the palpable grind in his knees that echoed how the transformation felt, the hungry edge of the wolf behind his throat that said the moon wasn’t far, the way exhaustion hammered into the inside of his skull as soon as he stopped moving or maybe stepped a set amount away from the sounds of the Pet Shop Boys. His hands shook a little slipping a fingerful of tobacco into paper and he bared his teeth, annoyed.

As if by Apparition, Tonks was there with a full packet of straights, leaning a little drunk into his shoulder: ‘You’re so _old_ ,’ she giggled. ‘Who smokes Golden Virginia these days?’

‘I’m trying to be _healthy_ ,’ he drawled back, and took one anyway. She looked very pleased with herself – her round cheeks were flush from dancing, and he noticed that in the past hour the tips of her hair had gone blonde with highlights like some of the Muggle boy bands did these days. Tonks reached for a lighter and nearly dislodged her wand from her pocket, which made her laugh even more and nearly topple into the gutter as a cyclist went past.

‘ _Lumos_ ,’ she muttered as she clicked it; Remus shook his head and followed her gaze over the light to Naveed and his circle.

‘He’s just finished a play,’ she informed him in a knowing undertone. ‘That fit one. He’s your type, isn’t he?’

Remus shrugged in a way he thought looked noncommittal. ‘Not everyone’s my type who looks a bit like Sirius. How do you know, anyway – you don’t go to the theatre?’

‘Because half the boys at the Switchboard are in love with him and queued up for hours to get return tickets, so I had to work double shifts yesterday.’ Tonks squinted calculatingly towards Naveed, tilting her head. ‘Do you think I could pull that off, that cut? Or would it be a bit _too_ dykey on me?’

‘I really don’t think that’s a problem you have?’

She ran her hand contemplatively over the short scruff at the back of her head, slowing into a stroke that seemed habitual. ‘Amelia said I should try a buzzcut,’ she said abruptly. ‘But I think that was more just encouraging me. She was more old school butch, you know. Short back and sides.’

So. Remus’ left hip crunched unpleasantly as he shifted his weight; he suddenly didn’t want to talk about Tonks’ own dead lover, though he knew it was the polite and good thing to do and he the right person to do it. This, a few hours out after an organising meeting, felt so familiar that it cased the feeling of Sirius in something even more bearable and easy – he suspected that outright talking about death might spoil that.

‘Did she know about you volunteering with the Switchboard?’ he asked, as a sort of compromise.

Tonks’ head jerked up, gold flecking through her pupils in what he recognised as an expression of genuine surprise – she hadn’t been fishing for a conversation, he realised. Tonks had always been less subtle than that.

‘Yeah,’ she said cautiously. ‘I don’t think she got it, exactly – well, you know. In the way people like Kingsley and Moody understand it, but with, ah-’

‘-queerer sympathies?’

‘Well, I’ve always wondered about Kingsley.’ Tonks grinned a little and squared her shoulders beneath her denim jacket. ‘But yeah. She wasn’t like a lot of older witches – she understood that it wasn’t just a young person’s problem, or a men’s problem, or a Muggle thing. So she told me to do it but didn’t ask many questions about it.’

‘Neither did Sirius,’ Remus admitted. ‘I mean, it was a different context – it started happening when he was in Azkaban, so he’d only read about it in the papers. And we didn’t have so many Muggle friends before. But I think he saw how it made me feel, even if he understood – on paper, I guess – it was a problem that affected him too.’

Tonks pushed her tongue into her cheek. ‘And he was gutted Freddie Mercury died.’

Remus blinked – he’d nearly forgotten Sirius’ strange, howling grief over that delayed bad news, the first real blast of anger and sadness he’d shown since getting out of Azkaban. ‘Yes.’ He considered this for a moment longer. ‘That was when I realised he was getting better, actually. He got my record player back out.’

Tonks nodded and flicked her cigarette into the gutter: she understood this without having to expand on it. She jerked her head towards Naveed, who’d just been brought another drink but had his crowd filter out slightly; he was also leaning against the brick, eyes half-closed like he wanted to linger out of the busyness. ‘Think you should go congratulate him for his successful run.’

This, again, was too far a shove in a bad direction; Remus gritted his back teeth as he pushed himself off the wall and put out his own cigarette. ‘Nah. I want to get to know more of the Switchboard people, anyway.’

She snorted and pulled playfully at his arm but didn’t really push it. ‘You _are_ fucking old, Remus!’

‘They’re activists! They’re young, aren’t they, they’re hip, they might be able to forgive me having been me in the GLF-’

‘They’re _positively groo-ooo-vy_ ,’ Tonks drawled; Remus realised with a bit of a shock she was mocking Sirius’ West London accent and dated lilts towards the Seventies, consciously or otherwise, and her being related leapt forward. She linked arms with him and tugged him back towards the door. ‘Did I tell you the Ministry’s told me to stop?’

He halted in his tracks in the midst of the throng shuffling to get in, briefly forgetting privacy concerns. ‘What?’

‘The Switchboard. Got a letter and everything.’

‘ _Why?_ ’

‘Is it really that surprising? Surveillance is up, _fraternising with Muggles_ , dangerous distractions from Auror work during dangerous times…’

‘But-’ He hesitated; the crowd was drawing them close to Naveed, who looked over at Remus again, heavy-lidded and a little amused at the fact he and Tonks had obviously been discussing him. ‘Christ, Tonks – it’s not worth it, then, if you’re still doing things for the Order-’

‘Of course it is,’ she said belligerently, and winked at Naveed as she hauled Remus back inside towards the music. ‘Don’t be an idiot. You’re the one who taught me how fucking important it is, and if nothing else – how am I meant to get laid ever again, Moody’s Remedial Charms sessions?’

Remus nearly missed work the next morning and resolved to stop drinking for a little while, which seemed sensible despite the real roar of joy he’d felt in the pit of his aching bones when “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” came on. Alcohol seemed to drag him quicker into the approaching moon – he’d forgotten how fast it could come on with the Potion out of his system.

Work passed in a blur and Tim sent him home two hours early after he fell down the stairs trying to haul a keg up from the cellar, bashing his elbow to bleeding and making his headache worse. He only realised when he was on the Tube back, too tired to Apparate, that he hadn’t had the money to buy breakfast.

He took longer than usual hauling himself back to Kentish Town and on the long hike upstairs, pausing to pant on the dim-lit landing and glance out the dirty window before mounting the last flight to the flat. The middle-aged nudist across the road Sean had inexplicably dubbed Miranda had her curtains shut, an oddity, and though the days were getting longer and warm it was overcast and foreboding. Rain tapped against the single-glazed pane, nearly drowning out the sound of his uneven gait up the stairs. The flat door was unlocked and slightly ajar.

Remus paused; his heartbeat quickened tangible and bad-tasting in the back of his throat.

 _Dumbledore would’ve said_ – but perhaps he wouldn’t have, whether he was stopping by for an overdue conversation or the Death Eaters had taken a renewed interest or both.

His hand was already on his wand in the inside pocket of his duffle coat; Remus strained his ears for a moment, closing his mouth to take a deep, slow breath through his nose and listen in the pause between. Click of the radiator in the flat downstairs; rain growing regular in the drainpipe; mould faint and heavy on his tongue mixed with the hangover taste. No one else was audibly in the building, which was also odd.

‘ _Hominem revelio_ ,’ he murmured, and after a moment the spell pulsed tangibly back and flared briefly blue at his wand tip – one person inside. Someone without magic.

Keeping his grip firm on his wand, Remus stepped up the stairs on the pads of his worn-out trainers, pausing again to listen. Even if it was just a Muggle burglar, he was in no condition for a fight to get physical. After a moment, he slipped into the little sitting room.

Sean was asleep on the couch, mouth half-open and his freckled cheek pressed awkwardly into the space between the cushions. A plastic bin bag with one of his jumpers spilling out lay tossed on the coffee table; his shoes were still on, and even in sleep he looked pale and unnatural beneath his shock of sweaty red hair. But here he was, wrapped in an unfamiliar too-big black coat, and his hand dangled from the couch by what had been his new favourite mug before he went into hospital – a FUCK MAGGIE mug he said was vintage. He breathed audibly, a slight rasp left over from pneumonia, but his face was slack and body comfortably heavy on the couch. It was the first time Remus had heard him breathing without the ominous hiss and beep of background hospital noise in six months.

He crossed to tuck the throw blanket over him unthinkingly. The movement made Sean stir; Remus realised with a little thrill of horror as his eyes flickered open that his wand was still clasped at his side and hanging in plain view.

‘Hiya.’ Sean smacked his lips a little, shifting luxuriantly under the tatty blanket one of his relatives had knitted for the fictional girlfriend he’d invented in 1987. Remus kept his hand loose and heavy on his chest to prevent him from getting up, but he raised his head anyway, blinking at Remus and focusing on his wand. ‘You took my bed, you bitch. What’s…?’

‘You left the door open,’ Remus said gently, stroking his hair back to pull his attention away as he slipped the wand back in his coat pocket. ‘You should’ve rung to say. I didn’t know you were getting out.’

‘Oh, I ran away, dear.’ He glanced up at his hesitant expression and grinned, the wicked camp curve Remus remembered. ‘Honestly, Mam. You want to see my discharge certificate?’

‘Don’t I have your keys?’

Sean was fading again, but in the good way, honest tired rather than the kind of overwhelmed and bare-angry his illness made him. He yawned and curled his hand under his ear: silver hoop earrings, the ones they’d confiscated on the ward shortly after Princess Diana had complimented them, slightly scuffed at the fastenings. ‘What kind of queen would I be,’ he murmured, ‘if I didn’t have the keys to my own kingdom, darling.’

Remus chuckled and crouched as best he could, collecting the FUCK MAGGIE mug with one hand and balancing with the other to keep the weight off his knees. ‘What does that make me? The stable boy?’

‘The wizard,’ Sean said drowsily, and smiled wide and dreamy as Remus rose too quickly with something under his breath about letting him sleep. His fingers brushed lazily against Remus’ as he moved towards the bedroom to change the sheets and disinfect the space.

‘Remus.’

He turned.

‘You’re not being – tragic still, are you?’

Remus stood still in the dim light and considered briefly, resting his tongue against the top of his mouth as he sorted some things through and made a small decision. ‘One thing at a time,’ he said lightly, and went to write a letter with the door locked by magic behind him.

* * *

  
May came and Dumbledore was still absent. Tonks took him for a drink with Kingsley, who she insisted was gay but Remus knew well had had a brief, experimental, mutually agreed-upon one-night stand with Sirius during the first war that had ended on amicable terms. He’d not seen anyone else in the Order since Sirius and the familiarity of Kingsley, broad-shouldered and low-voiced and quietly perceptive, hit harder than Remus could’ve predicted. He managed his way through the key news – Dumbledore was after something, still away on lengthy trips without giving much away – and, after Kingsley gently put a hand on his knee and asked how he was doing, needed a brief soul-emptying weep in the Leaky Cauldron’s cold toilet. Afterwards, Tonks took him to a Switchboard meeting and put him on the phones for the night. Work, she said. We’ve done enough drinking for two.

A new letter had arrived from the Werewolf Registry, making his own quiet decision to contact the London pack both timely and too much of a coincidence. Having Sean in the flat again was a blessing, coming home to clattering and swearing in the kitten and Kylie blasting at all hours, but it made Remus paranoid too – he quickly set up a dead-drop for owl post near Dennis’ mobile library, relying on his elder’s poor eyesight and fondness for London wildlife spotting to minimise any oddness. He kept the letters Disillusioned under his new pull-out couch bed in case Sean went snooping.

The Werewolf Registry had noted his absence from St Mungo’s, as well as his lack of communication about his full moon plans. This, Remus knew, he could not put off for very long – another moon, maybe, though the next one was in a week’s time and after that he couldn’t say. The London werewolves seemed to understand why he was writing without him saying exactly why he needed advice, though their correspondence came from a Muggle typewriter and bore no magical traces linked to individuals beyond the assurance that they would find a way to contact him for a more secure conversation. Remus hadn’t dared ask Kingsley for the latest intelligence on the London pack’s allegiances – trust and like Kingsley as he did, he didn’t want the Order getting wind of him having health problems.

He was sat on the couch finishing an acknowledgement to the wolves –  _Will wait for your owl_ – when Sean barged out of the bedroom in a green silk dressing gown, crossing to the narrow full-length mirror hanging by the door to twist and scowl at his slow-to-fill-out ribcage. Remus hastily slid the slip of parchment between the pages of Sean's battered coffeetable copy of _Capital_ and brought his knees to his chest.

‘The illusion of privacy would be nice?’

‘Oh, stop,’ Sean scoffed. ‘You’ve been living here practically rent-free – you can stand my tragically wasted body making an entrance. Very Saint Sebastian, _n’est pas?_ ’ He turned and flopped his hands to his sides. ‘Are you ill _again?_ You look fucking awful, baby.’

He was a little offended at the suggestion, comparatively speaking – he’d avoided any scars on his face at the last transformation, though getting out of bed had felt progressively harder and flu-like over the past few days. ‘I’m fine.’

‘When did you last get tested?’

‘Are you the AIDS fairy godmother here?’ Remus snapped, a little testy. ‘Last month. Of course I have. I know more about your own dosages than you do – your pills are in my coat pocket, incidentally, I picked them up again.’

Sean pouted and flounced to the door coatrack, giving his reflection another critical squint on the way. ‘I’m just saying you look a bit _peaky_ , is all.’

‘I’ve had four tests in six months. And no sex,’ he added sharply.

‘Oh, Jaysus.’ He thumped down on the couch next to Remus, poking him in the ribs with a meaningful foot. ‘That pal of yours is back to shagging, isn’t she? Sirius’ cousin?’

Remus frowned briefly; but they’d met, of course, a few weeks ago when Tonks had crashed at theirs. The two of them were still drinking too much, but together, at least, and usually in conjunction with taking simultaneous volunteer shifts at the Switchboard. They’d fallen into a rhythm together, Remus taking the more acute crises and Tonks letting people talk and talk until she got them laughing. Sean had made a snide remark about _the first time there’s been a woman in this house!_ but been genuinely delighted by her and her ability to talk back to him and at pace. _If there’s any family resemblance_ , he’d said ruefully, _you had a handful and no mistake._

And she was, or so he suspected. Remus hadn’t asked directly but there was a butch girl her age or a bit younger, Ro, who’d started coming to training days and then the bars afterwards. She was quiet but took in the train in from somewhere small in Essex and recently had started staying out past when the last train ran – Remus had asked Sean for the times, just to clarify. Ro had shaved her head – in tribute to Sinéad O’Connor, she said – and the next day Tonks had shown up for her Switchboard shift with a fresh buzz, grinning like a shit-eating hedgehog with a secret.

‘Anyway,’ Sean continued, a bit triumphant at his pause. ‘I’ve been making enquiries on your behalf, even if I’m not fit to re-enter society just yet. Aren’t I a talent?’

Remus rolled his eyes warningly – Sean cut him off with an impatient flick of his hand.

‘That actor we like – Naveed.’

‘ _Sean_ -’

‘He’s in another show next week. Some _My Beautiful Laundrette_ spinoff at the Soho Theatre, that one on Dean Street.’

‘Is it actually, or are you just being racist?’

‘I’ve been fisted by enough _curated_ Daniel Day-Lewis lookalikes from that fucking film to know,’ Sean informed him haughtily. ‘It’s an unofficial stage version, or something. Maybe a reading? Anyway – your man’s in it playing the lead. And a little birdy’s told me he’s been eyeing you up on nights out for weeks, which you’ve neglected to mention.’

Remus made what he hoped was a noncommittal and suspicious noise. Sean glared at him ferociously, still hawkish and pointed from his weight loss under his freckles.

‘You should _go_. Apparently he doesn’t fuck anyone while he’s doing a show and cuts loose after. And-and- _and_ – don’t let the eyeliner fool you, he’s a top.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Sean.’

‘I am looking _after_ you.’ His eyes softened a little and he cupped the back of Remus’ grey-streaked head briefly, gentle. ‘You deserve a little relief, darling. You went straight from Sirius to looking after me. I can’t honestly guess which bit was more fucking miserable for you.’

Naveed’s show turned out to be on Wednesday night, which was the full moon. Remus felt a little rotten about finally lying and saying he’d go, especially when his answer lit up Sean’s face with something like genuine relief. It felt a bit like his increasingly complicated lies about Sirius, who Sean had begun to ask more questions about after Tonks’ visit – kind, sweet little curious details, but enough that Remus was conscious of needing to lie every time he invented Sirius’ past at Harrow or motorcycle racing career.

In the days leading up to Wednesday, he found himself spending more daytimes out at the Switchboard offices before going to work in the evening. Sean was starting to get restless with bedrest but was being timid about going out in a way that Remus didn’t remember from when he’d met him over three years ago before illness set in. He hung hungrily around Remus for gossip from Molly Moggs, but didn’t see people yet beyond the odd phone call. He was evasive about how he felt and so more inclined to ask Remus about what he was doing. So Remus got up early and stayed out or, on nights when he knew Sean stayed up to watch telly, ducked around to the library dead-drop to check his post. The werewolves had sent him nothing. Neither had the Order.

The lead-up to the moon without Wolfsbane was becoming familiar again in a horrible sort of way. He slept more to avoid the ache in his swelling joints, curling up on a Switchboard cot or lingering in the bath in the mornings. He’d read a scare-pamphlet, a few years ago, that werewolves’ sex drives went into uncontrollable overdrive while the moon was waxing, and had told Sirius this – that conversation stuck in his head on a loop as he picked up phones with questions about dental dams, fears about a partner leaving, needing an abortion, how best to please your lover when you’ve never slept with a man before.

 _– This all comes back to that fucking Umbridge – and now she’s in my fucking bedroom and even when I know, objectively, that it’s old news and wrong, here it comes again. It’s so_ fucking _pervasive._

_Sirius, lounging but alert on his bare stomach, sunken dark eyes tracking from where his chin rests on his folded hands against the bed as Remus paces: when they were nineteen, he learned properly by repetition rather than instinct how to go quiet and listen when Remus talks about werewolf things. He has more patience now and is quieter and so Remus is more patient with him. It’s not him he’s angry with._

_– I hate feeling like this, Remus confesses, and jerks his hand vague and angry towards his body and the little room. This, his first home after Hogwarts, the little rural Yorkshire house where Sirius is and he no longer has to make every small gesture into a careful non-threat. They fuck here and sort things out, lay groundwork for the rest which Remus hopes – knows, actually, is really very sure – will come. – I used to think it’d get easier, even a year or two into the first war. Or not think – I knew better but I was genuinely hopeful, you know? That maybe things wouldn’t get actively worse. I thought that was a reasonable thing to wish._  
  
_Sirius nods. He gestures. They touch more now and Remus gets used to this. Their bodies are different now and he gets used to this, learns to love re-fitting, realises the body he fantasised about when Sirius was Azkaban – sometimes guiltily, sometimes not – is not as good as the one he has now. Sirius’ hair, grown-out and messy, is now the accidental same as it was during his Sid Vicious phase but Remus can barely picture Sirius as a teenager, though there was that agonising year at Hogwarts when every little glance and wry angle made him terrified and feral and vivid with memory. This conversation is full entirely of the language they didn’t get to grow together, learned touches with Remus vibrating angry and Sirius exploring new parts of him._  
  
_A hand on his back, slid under his shirt to too-warm skin._  
  
_– It’s not even true, is the thing I’m hung up on. Isn’t that fucking mental._  
  
_Sirius’ laugh as a rasping doggish huff, the inhale against his ribs. – You don’t have to tell me that. It’s always-_  
  
_– After._  
  
_– Yeah. That’s just you though, I reckon. He relaxes, thumbs Remus’ lip. – Unless they said something about the full moon’s affect on gag reflex._  
  
_Remus jerks his head back impatient, his weight on Sirius urgent and full of non-specific anger still. – I want to tell some of these Muggles sometimes._  
  
_– That-?_  
  
_– Just that I know what it’s like. How it’s going to go. People don’t put money, research, time – into people like us, and I think a lot of them still don’t realise that. I either just want them to hear me or I want to save their lives with all that – I dunno. It feels fucking selfish either way._  
  
_Tracing his collarbone, too prominent. His legs between Sirius’ and the press of their cocks between their jeans. Sirius getting hard but lazily, smelling like the press-ups he did restless this morning. The thoughtful lilt to his gaze from Remus’ nose to the old white scar in his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth._  
  
_– Self-preservation isn’t the worst reason to save the odd life, he says gently._  
  
_– You’re trying to make me feel better, Remus points out wryly, – so you can fuck me. I’m just feeling sorry for myself._  
  
_– Remus, he says sharp, the way he does now they’re grown._ Moony _is discarded or for groups, no longer more of an endearment than his own name. – I think I’ve got a pretty fucking good idea of where the line is for drowning in self-pity, married to a werewolf. It’s fine. It’s_ reasonable. _Be as angry as we need to be, right – you say jump, I say how high. It’s the least I can do._  
  
Remus had accepted this so far that he’d remembered the conversation in vivid detail – he remembered, too, not being quite so exasperated by the self-inclusion in the oppressed _we_ or the lingering stupid-cheesy posh grandeurisms that got Sirius through school and war and probably a few moments in Azkaban. He was angry on the phone tonight, palpably, and yet it felt good in his belly and warmed him up as he automatically tempered his language depending on the caller’s mood. Tonks’ usual desk was empty tonight. She had a date, she’d owned up in her latest owl, with Ro.  
  
Midnight came. The callers past midnight were, unsurprisingly, more likely to be emergencies, but tonight the phones were relatively quiet. Remus stretched back in his chair, went to get a cup of instant coffee, had a pensive gaze out the window and watched the last Tube’s lights grumble and stream past on the bridge a few streets over. The warm mug soothed the stabs in his knuckles; the moon was somewhere overhead, humming palpably in the back of his brain as it dappled the leaves of the little oak stretching up to the office window. It would actually be summer soon, Remus realised. Nearly a year since Sirius’ death. He’d made it this far after all.

The shrill phone made him twitch; someone’s leg jerked and kicked a table leg downstairs. Remus kicked his shoes off and padded back to his desk in his socks, clearing his throat before answering.

‘Hello, London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. This is Remus, who’s this?’

‘Hello, Remus. We thought this might be easier than an owl.’

He froze, eyes fixed ahead at the postcard of the Empire State Building another volunteer had blue-tacked to the bulletin board and hand going automatically for his wand. The impulse to say _what_ rose in his throat and he swallowed it – half because he knew that no one at the Ministry had the imagination to try him here, and also because the rolling gentle male voice, East London tinged and baritone, sounded familiar.

‘Less turnaround time, I suppose,’ he said slowly.

The man – werewolf – on the other end chuckled, genuine amusement warming down the line. ‘More discreet than owls by the Kentish Town library.’

Of course. Remus bit the inside of his cheek, reminding himself: there was no telling how far Greyback had made himself at home here.

‘What can we do for you, then?”

‘I think you probably know.’

‘Yes. What are your plans for tomorrow night?’

He hesitated. ‘One of the old squats. I don’t transform in London.’

A noncommittal head-twist, barely audible. ‘The one up North?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’ll be brief and blunt here, Remus, I don’t want to take up your time there – we don’t have a lot of resources to go around, and you’ve very deliberately chosen not to contact the pack before, which is your right. But we’ve got to prioritise the people in our family.’

‘I understand,’ Remus said, though he didn’t exactly – he hadn’t spoken to other werewolves in a long time and, even when he was doing intelligence work for the Order, had only heard Midlands rumours about the politics of the Londoners. Most wolves naturally preferred living out in the country, where transformations were easier and fewer accidents happened, in small insular groups. Anyone who lived in the city, everyone not from London tended to agree, was mental or political or both, and in wartime especially it was best to minimise the potential for trouble. He glanced reflexively over his shoulder around the dim-lit, grey-walled office – there was no telling when exactly the next shift would drop by. ‘I wanted to know – I just need to know what my options are, really. What other people are doing – if there’s anything happening with the Ministry, or if people have managed to get married-’

‘We’re not recommending that,’ the voice said flatly. The line crackled and surged unnaturally; Remus held the receiver away from his mouth for a moment and murmured a spell to check for magic.

‘Why?’

‘Are you telling people _there_ to get married?’

Remus snorted. ‘Sometimes, yeah! Or adopted. If it’s a question of survival.’

‘Some of us,’ the man said carefully, in a tone that gave nothing away, ‘don’t see the Potion as a necessity. So we’re not going down that route.’ _  
_

This could mean lots of things: Remus felt a heavy sense of resigned dread in his stomach and clenched his wand tight in his lap. ‘So you can’t help me.’

Another chuckle, this time thrilling viscerally down to Remus’ toes with a mix of horror and something else. ‘Well, that would be awkward. Aren’t you coming to my show tomorrow?’

He hadn’t, he realised as he stared blankly at the little stick figure someone had drawn on the postcard Empire State Building, actually heard Naveed speak in a long time.

The silence apparently went on long enough that Naveed – Naveed, the actor who’d been at the National, who danced effortless and liquid in Soho and wore eyeliner even offstage and had silver streaks through his black hair – Remus had always assumed he was older but the little circle of quiet men who followed him to the bars were probably only his own age, friends, then – cleared his throat politely. The same low laugh was just behind his question: ‘You didn’t guess, huh?’

‘I thought-’

‘Oh, I do think you’re very handsome, Remus – don’t worry about that. But I don’t cruise very much these days. I’ve been asked to keep an eye on you. They needed another poof who runs around with the Muggles.’

Remus had managed to get his tongue working again, just. ‘The rest of – your lot sound, ah. Delightful.’

Naveed laughed. ‘I don’t live with the rest of the pack. Big surprise. They’re worse than my parents. So you’re not coming to my show?’  
  
‘It’s – tomorrow’s full moon.’

‘It’s in the afternoon! Show must go on. Do you know _My Beautiful Laundrette_?’

‘Yeah. Yes. I mean, I saw the film a few times.’

‘It’s the only gay Pakistani thing they’ll let us put on in central, I reckon,’ he sneered. ‘I wrote the stage adaptation myself. It’s sexier.’ _  
_

Remus pushed his tongue incredulously into the side of his cheek, torn between a sudden faint but tangible flash of arousal and the entire situation. Here was a werewolf – the first one he’d spoken to in a year and a half, as far as he knew, and the first one he hadn’t clocked in he didn’t know how long – and he was Naveed, gay and an RVT regular and with access to the Potion and in an even sexier adaptation of _My_ fucking _Beautiful Laundrette_ and tomorrow, screamed the reality in his muscles and the way his back had locked up just sitting here for three minutes, was the full moon. And someone was coming up the back stair, suddenly but surely, tromping in heavy boots and headed his way.

‘Naveed – I’m sorry. I don’t think I can – I’m not feeling well enough,’ he admitted, quick and awful but honest. Another werewolf, at least, would understand. ‘But I need – can we speak, later? Someone’s coming.’

There was a quick, disappointed nod over the magicked line and Naveed’s connection began to break up before he’d hung up. ‘We can get you the – Potion, Rem-. See you at – weekend.’

‘Break a leg,’ he called reflexively, but Naveed was gone.

Tonks burst in the door, swaying a little with a half-full bottle of rosé and a shit-eating grin. She wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the design she used to wear as a patch on the back of her denim vest – BUTCH LOVE/BUTCH RAGE in a flaming heart stabbed with wicked-looking daggers – and green cargo trousers which, she’d informed him last week, were the big new thing for straight women but would have to be pried from her cold dead lesbian legs. Her hair was bubblegum pink and spiked again, a shock almost as visceral as the traces of the phone call.

‘ _There_ you are – Sean said you’d be here. I almost-’ She hiccupped and plopped into a spare folding chair with a metallic _clack_ from the many zippers on her trousers ‘-Apparated into a wall in Clapham, _twice_ , trying to cross town – fucking _menace_.’

‘You went to the flat?’ Remus said, trying not to laugh; he reached out and grabbed the bottle. The alcohol surged right through him, moon-high, but with the excess adrenaline he didn’t care.

‘Yeah! I have –  _news_.’ Tonks leaned forward, her cheeks nearly as pink as her hair. She was beaming and sweaty and had a love-bite peeking above her shirt collar. He raised an eyebrow, indulging her in the suspense.

‘I got _laid!_ I-’ She seemed to remember where she was, suddenly, and frowned at the empty bank of phones down the desk to his left. ‘Oh, fuck – was I meant to be on tonight?’

‘Jesus Christ, don’t leave it there!’

Tonks rolled back on her chair, splaying out her legs and grinning. ‘Ro says I’m _just like magic_. And she made me cum three times.’ She caught his expression and lifted a triumphant finger. ‘If you say that’s _too much information_ , Remus Lupin – you’re a – Gay Liberation-type misogynist, plain and simple!’

He held up his hands and hid a smile. ‘I’m very happy for you.’

‘Thanks.’ She glanced around and then back to him, staring pensively for a moment. ‘A year’s not too soon, is it.’

‘No.’

‘But you think it is,’ she said. ‘For you.'

Remus shrugged. She was slightly too drunk for him to explain about Naveed: he was slightly too fresh from the conversation to be able to explain, or to know himself. Since he’d shut the mental door on Sean’s attempt to set them up, he’d not had time to think through the wider implications. ‘It’s different. It’s when you feel ready.’

‘It’s not just – that you and Sirius, you know. Had all that time. It’s still dangerous for you.’ She sat her tongue between her teeth and took in the posters around the office – Terrence Higgins Trust, photos, the PWA checklist stapled up and handwritten in big block letters. ‘Ro has HIV.’

‘Did you-?’

‘ _Yes_ ,’ she cut in sharply. ‘I know more about positive women’s issues than you do. We were safe. But she wanted to tell me.’

Remus sat back a little in his chair. Tonks was watching him for a reaction.

‘She said she’s planning out the rest of her life now. She had to put it on hold for a while – that’s what she said.’ She shrugged and the smile broke its way onto her thoughtful expression, creasing the corners of her eyes where, Remus noticed, she was getting the very beginnings of crow’s feet. ‘I told her about Amelia. She said it sounded like we both needed an orgasm or five.’

They both smirked at each other and the phone rang; Tonks launched herself up and leapt for it, hanging off Remus’ blocking arm with her fist in her mouth to stifle her giggles while he answered and tried to keep his voice steady. _This is Remus. Who’s this?_

* * *

The week after the full moon was a week until the anniversary of Sirius’ death, and also the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard’s annual Pride-planning party. The actual parade had been a generally dismal affair since the miners’ strike, to the point that people were talking more and more single-mindedly about the hypothetical float they’d make for the year Thatcher died, and so London’s gays were taking their party opportunities where they could fucking get them.

Remus had taken a few days off from work to recover from the full moon. He stayed at Tonks’ place to avoid Sean asking questions about the deep claw-gouge across his back – she had a full bathtub at her little bedsit in Stratford and anyway was spending a lot of quality time with Ro out in Nowhere, Essex. Tonks was very amused by Ro’s marvelling about the amount of time and commitment she seemed to put into the commute, to which Remus wryly pointed out that Ro wasn’t entirely wrong since Tonks nearly took as long as the train by mis-Apparition. He had a new bruise on his shoulder where she’d punched him a little too hard – apparently this had been a sore point in her latest assessment from Moody.

He slept too much and heard from no one for a while. Sean seemed to be a bit hurt by his silence so was avoiding ringing and Dennis didn’t ask questions when he needed some time off; Remus was vaguely aware of the time passing but the quiet at Tonks’ flat was a relief. He played old records he hadn’t heard for a long time – Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Sister Rosetta Tharpe – and sat in the bath writing bits of a letter to Sirius.

Remus did not particularly believe in God or the afterlife. He’d done some reading, maybe a month or two after Sirius died, about the holdings in the Department of Mysteries – he’d wanted to know the logistics, if nothing else, the potential implications, behind Sirius’ long, slow slip through the archway, his faint look of surprise fading to nothing and nothing again. Unsurprisingly, the answer was either classified or unknown, and at the time he hadn’t had the energy to pursue it further when half his dreams were about Sirius – wearing, jerking him awake, making him weep or throw up or cum or laugh. Now, he supposed, he’d never know the exact details of how Sirius had died – he included this in his letter, a little self-consciously, as though to apologise for not trying harder. The thought made him hold the tip of his quill between his teeth and pause.

 _I’m not writing this to explain myself, or coax myself into believing that maybe it’ll loop around to you somehow and you’ll read it and send me some kind of violent dramatic otherworldly message (I think you’d have done that already if you could)._ _But I just miss you and I want you to know where I am now_ , _love._ _It feels like the least I can do._

He worked at it in the afternoons in pieces and then set it aside. He’d deliberately done very little formal mourning to avoid anything approaching the spiritual but it felt right, now, to choose to finish it on the actual anniversary of Sirius’ death and write what came into his head on the day. He rang his parents the Muggle way – his dad kept an old phone in the house to keep in touch with his family. He had a note in his dead-drop in Dumbledore’s hand that said simply _We need to see about the werewolves. Greyback may be in London_ , to which he did not reply. He wrote a more straightforward letter to Harry, who he resolved to go see at the Burrow as soon as school was out. The hardest part – the bit that wasn’t about school or grief – came at the end:

_Sirius would’ve been annoyed that I haven’t kept in better touch with you while you’ve been at Hogwarts this year. He was also adamant that, if anything should happen to him, I not step in as a godfather in his place. He told me once he didn’t want any more parents dying on you, and that seemed fair to him and to James and Lily.  
_

_Respecting his wishes have been important to me this year. But I regret not making it clear to you, Harry, either out of a sense of duty as your former teacher or out of respect to Sirius, that you have family here. I am not going anywhere._

Friday rolled around and Remus wore tight black jeans and a Switchboard T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the party, which he knew Tonks would say was boring but it felt good, looking like everyone else and fitting in. He watched his own flickering reflection in the Tube doors – greying hair mussed over to the right, grey eyes less bruised underneath than they’d been two days ago, jeans snug at the hips– and decided he looked healthy. Well enough, in the circumstances. He felt better too.

He truly hadn’t expected Naveed to be there. He’d said the weekend, and he wasn’t really one for activism despite being adjacent in the scene – or maybe his obligations to the werewolves explained it, Remus thought, standing a little on tiptoe to watch Naveed laugh at the front of the queue for the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. When he got in twenty minutes later, the werewolf was sat with a drink at a table tilted casually towards the door, one leather-trousered leg over the other and a decidedly sly glint in the look he gave Remus over the heads of his Switchboard fan club.

‘Hi,’ he called, and gestured with a ringed hand; a few boys shot daggers at Remus. Tonks was by the bar with her arm around Ro’s waist, the two of them laughing uproariously in a circle of the younger women volunteers.

Naveed had bought him a vodka-coke. Remus sat in the chair next to him rather than across, leaving room for the dancers; Naveed adjusted comfortably to put a knee against his. Remus settled in and let him. ‘How was your show?’

‘Lovely, thanks,’ he said loudly over the sudden blast of music, and dipped his head to add a bit more ruefully: ‘You were right, really. I had to Apparate halfway to Portsmouth fifteen minutes before moonrise – split my favourite coat and threw up half a sheep the next morning. Not very professional of me.’

Remus chuckled and took him in, looking half-consciously at the sharp edges of his temples and the broad bridge of his nose for physical evidence of the transformation; Naveed looked amused. ‘Stage makeup,’ he explained. ‘I can show you, if you like. Sometimes Muggle stuff is the simplest when magic doesn’t work.’

‘I didn’t know you were coming tonight. Is the London lot keeping that good an eye on me?’

‘Well,’ he admitted, and did another pretend-lazy glance around the bar, ‘I’d meant to come see you tomorrow. Your friend – Tonks, is that her name? The Auror? – said you’re staying over at hers.’

‘You asked?’

‘Oh, she offered, very enthusiastically.’ Naveed grinned and ran the edge of his nail along the seam of Remus’ jeans. ‘But I did ask where you’d be tonight.’

He’d been used to how to play this, a few years ago, and would’ve had a genuinely good line too depending on what particular level of poverty or precarious living situation was occupying his mind at the time. Now, Remus realised, he was simply sex-starved and several years’ worth of emotionally sand-blasted. He grunted.

Naveed seemed to take this cue and leaned his head closer, but kept his drink between them to signal this part wasn’t related – Remus could feel some of the other volunteers looking at them but a little whoosh of a spell passed under the table and he knew that no one would be overhearing them, especially with a new pop hit he didn’t recognise thundering to life.

‘I’ve spoken to the others,’ he said, sipping his own vodka-coke. ‘We’ve got enough for next month – maybe two. We’ll need an extra hand from you getting some of the ingredients, but we’ve got an ace potionmaker. She’s reliable. I’ve only taken hers for the past year.’

‘Where are you getting the materials?’ Remus felt his brow furrow a little.

‘France – well, via a few other places on the Continent. But we’ve got some long-established trade lines that the Ministry doesn’t know about yet. We’re not too worried. It’s just a matter of making a run every month, since we can’t get a lot of the stuff in bulk.’

Naveed drew back a little and studied his reaction to this, pushing his own dark quiff back into place with the heel of his hand. ‘It’s no obligation towards the pack,’ he added, a little gentler. ‘We take care of our own and that’s a general promise – we’ve been looking after people in Devon, Ayrshire, even South fucking Armagh. But you’re welcome to get to know some people through me, if you want. Feel it out, like. The Potion’s yours either way, long as you can come to Calais on the twentieth.’

 _We need to see about the werewolves_. Remus nodded wordlessly and held out his hand to dance.

The pub was shaking to the rafters with Freddie Mercury’s big beautiful voice, raucous ghost-thundering over feet slamming the floor and Pride planning quite forgotten. Naveed was fucking him rough in a toilet stall and Remus was five drinks in and delirious with feeling – alive, alive, his teeth on his neck hot and his cock so tight in him, both of them laughing when someone banged on the cubicle and sighed audibly at Remus’ hand gripping the top of the door white-knuckled. It felt like ten years ago and didn’t. Like real relief – Naveed’s hand hard and faster on his slick cock, jeans cutting into the backs of his thighs, _living on my own_ beating into his temples clear of the moon-ache in rhythm with fucking.

And Tonks was there, suddenly, her voice clear and urgently sober; she banged on the door and Naveed growled to a whine that said he’d been playing a little cooler and harder to get than he’d felt.

‘Remus!’

‘Fuck,’ Remus panted, and yanked at the waistband of his jeans clumsily; he turned and Naveed kissed him greedily, tasting like vodka and backing him into the stall door, which unceremoniously gave way. Tonks had unlocked it by magic.

Naveed gripped his hip to steady him and Remus turned to glare, but she’d already locked eyes with Naveed, blocking the view of the rest of the dark toilet but communicating something direct and desperate that had nothing to do with what was going on outside.

‘Remus – I’m sorry, I need you, right now-’

He buckled his belt and stumbled out of the stall; Naveed quietly let him go.

They went outside to the smoking area and Tonks shoved them through the crowd, out briefly into the cold-spiked spring night-time and the rush of traffic that sucked the thump of the music right out of his bones. Remus was tingling still from coming, pleasantly raw but shivering in his T-shirt and coming round sharply to Tonks’ distress – something was very wrong.

She dragged him under the tunnel leading towards the Vauxhall Tube station and pushed him against the wall, holding his upper arms and shaking him a little. ‘Remus-’

‘Yes – what? _What?_ ’

‘Dumbledore – a Patronus-’ She was gasping a little and shook him again, leaning into him – Remus grabbed her arms too.

‘Tonks –  _what?_ When?’

‘Just now. When I was out for a cigarette. There’s Death Eaters at Hogwarts, now. Now. Right now. Have you got your wand – oh, Jesus.’

So.

Remus took a deep, slow breath. Tonks was searching his face urgently, brown eyes flicking for signs of sobriety; he locked gazes and she breathed too, slowing them both down.

‘I’m fine,’ he said firmly. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’m sorry. I really, really didn’t want to, with Naveed – I didn’t know what to do.’ She winced and dug into her vest, pulling out her wand, which was flaring briefly red. ‘Fuck – that’s the call from Moody. Remus, this is really happening – I know you haven’t done anything for the Order for ages, I shouldn’t put you in this position, but-’

‘Hey.’ He put a hand on her cheek, cupping her face and pushing a hand through her pink hair: it struck him hard and sudden that this was what he’d done with Sirius to calm him down, not as adults but when they were kids in the first war, reeling with news. ‘You’ve done this before,’ he said gently, and slipped his wand from his pocket to bring up to her eye-level. ‘You’re really good at this. Look – I’m right here with you. He’ll keep, okay?’

Tonks closed her eyes briefly and took another breath; her hair flashed dark again and flattened against her forehead, mousy and un-spiked like it’d been when he’d first seen her again all those months ago. He blinked.

‘Safer,’ she explained, and pushed back against him to take a few meditative stomps and clear her system. Suddenly she laughed a little wildly, the sound bouncing off the gloomy cement tunnel.

‘Remus – this is going to sound insane.’

He did a Freezing Charm to sober himself up a little and bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Planning ahead. ‘Go for it.’

‘Will you marry me?’

Dumbledore and a Patronus and the letter he’d left on the side of Tonks’ bath, unfinished and waiting for morning, he could handle – the war was rushing into where the dancing and fucking had been and filling him up, splitting him open, making him hot with inevitability and adrenaline that chased away the mid-May chill. This was entirely something else, and made Remus bark a laugh too.

‘Jesus, Tonks.’

‘I’m serious.’ She squared her shoulders and glanced down either end of the tunnel, drawing her own wand properly and murmuring a few spells to dull her clothing. ‘I’ll get down on my knees later, if you want, but I really am serious – I’ve been thinking about it.'

The last Tube was approaching above them, rattling the rails and thudding like the memory of Blitz bombs down into Vauxhall’s foundations. The party would be going on for a while yet, Remus thought dazedly. He hadn’t even left London in months, except for the transformations, and that didn’t really count. He was still wearing his London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard T-shirt – Tonks followed his eyes or his thought and flicked her wand, turning it black and prompting his response.

‘Tonks – Naveed’s a werewolf. I’ve been talking to him – the London pack – for a while now, we sorted it out tonight. I can get the Potion from them. I don’t need to bother about the Ministry rules.’

‘I know – I’m good at this, remember? Even intelligence stuff, sometimes.’ She tapped her head with her wand tip and gave him a small, tight smile. ‘Well, he told me. But I was thinking about what you said that night. About safety in numbers. And with the war on whether we like it or not, and our world being the way it is, not like fucking London, and now this – oh, fuck it, we have to _go_ -’

‘I’ll Apparate us,’ Remus said automatically – he was better at it and he could feel the way forming in his gut, the pull north arranging itself in his head and body and the alcohol already feeling quite out of his system. He reached for Tonks’ hand, pulling her close so their chests almost touched; to a Muggle walking past who wasn’t looking too hard, they could nearly be a straight couple on their lingering way home on a Friday night.

Tonks stared at him with their panting breaths mingling and her dark eyes, hard and too old and gentle at the same time, looked like Sirius’. ‘Think about it,’ she said quietly. ‘If we get through tonight. And if I’m being stupid, you can – I don’t know, you can give me a lecture as long as you like on Gay Liberation and I’ll have to buy you drinks through the whole thing.’

Remus either snorted or groaned and on giddy impulse leaned forward quick to kiss her forehead. She wrapped her arms around him tight, the fist clenching her wand digging into his spine and her heart hammering against his collarbone. He swallowed and breathed in the piss-stink of the tunnel as the Tube train slowed and its doors slid open somewhere overhead, spilling passengers back into south London and the weekend.

‘Go,’ Tonks growled into his shoulder. ‘Before I lose my fucking nerve.’

‘Yes, then,’ he murmured. ‘Before I lose mine.’ And he took them towards the fighting.

**Author's Note:**

> The London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard was founded in March 1974 and continues today as Switchboard UK. Several of its core members helped found the Terrence Higgins Trust, which is still the UK's leading HIV/AIDS charity, a year after the UK's first officially confirmed AIDS case in December 1981.
> 
> Britain has less of a strong cultural legacy of AIDS crisis-era activism than countries like the US or France. The epidemic was and still is disproportionately focused on London with activists drawing heavily from American resources/language (like PWA; 'People with AIDS', a term that came out of early '80s San Francisco as an alternative to 'AIDS victims', and the 'Lazarus effect') and homegrown charities over some British direct action groups like OutRage!. This was consistent with a lot of pre-crisis British gay politics – I've imagined Remus (and probably Sirius, less earnestly) were members of the UK branch of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a movement that launched after Stonewall and was active in London especially during the '70s. 
> 
> This inconsistent activist history, as well as the devastating 1988-2000 Section 28 (the title's a nod to this) national ban on the promotion/publication of resources about homosexuality, are part of why there's been relatively little organised protection for LGBTQ life in London today, as seen by the many historic venues that've closed down over the past decade. The Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT), which gets pride of place in this story, is south London's oldest gay venue and still going strong, but Molly Moggs, where Remus works briefly, shut in 2017. In the long-term, the AIDS crisis years are still playing out in drawn-out, very recent battles for the National Health Service and British government to fund HIV-related treatment, preventive measures like PrEP, coverage for people in detention and/or with vulnerable immigration status, LGBTQ sex ed, and trans healthcare.
> 
> I've referenced a few of the bits of British AIDS history that do get remembered – Freddie Mercury being one of Britain's first publicly acknowledged celebrity AIDS deaths, Princess Diana's opening the UK's first AIDS ward at Middlesex Hospital and shocking the public for shaking hands with patients without gloves, The Sun and other tabloids' relentless, vicious campaign of homo/serophobia that echoes in their treatment of trans people today. Sean's also (not by name) from Portrush, the town where fellow gay Irish communist and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners founder Mark Ashton grew up.


End file.
